Renewal grads rise after city lowers bar

Mayor de Blasio has been boasting about how graduation rates are up at some of the city’s worst schools — but the improved numbers come with a big asterisk, The Post has learned.

Of the 3,371 graduates at the 31 high schools involved in Hizzoner’s Renewal Schools program, as many as 242 earned their diplomas using an appeals process that allows for lower scores on exams or other side-door routes.

The new appeals process, created and approved by the state Board of Regents, allows students graduating in 2016 to pass even if they got as low as a 60 on two of their five Regents exams.

The 2015 requirement to file an appeal was 62, while the regular passing mark for a Regents exam is 65. This led to a tripling of the number of students graduating using the appeals process in 2016 over 2015, city data show.

“There does appear to be a con- certed effort to use the appeal process to raise the graduation rate,” said David Bloomfield, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who reviewed data provided to The Post by the Department of Education.

If there hadn’t been accommodations made for low-scoring students, graduation rates at Renewal Schools would have ticked up by just 0.6 percent — up to 55.1 percent from 54.5 percent in 2015.

Instead, the graduation rate at Renewal Schools was 59.3 percent last year — a 4.2-percent increase.

The board also updated its “superintendent determination” option for special-education students that allows them to graduate based on their coursework — with super- intendent approval — if they scored at least a 52 on math and English Regents.

DOE officials said there was no way of determining whether the bulk of appeals students would have otherwise graduated.

“It is not accurate to attribute any increase in graduation rate solely to appeals,” said spokesman Will Mantell. “The State sets policies on pathways to college and career for New York State students, and we support schools as they utilize these options to best serve their students.”

With appeals, schools not under the Renewal program had a graduation rate of 73.7 percent in 2016.

Without them, the graduation rate would have been 71.5 percent, according to figures confirmed by Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College.

Last month, The Post documented the struggles of de Blasio’s Renewal Schools program, including dropping enrollment, skyrocketing costs and mixed academic results.